It seems almost unfair, sometimes, how talented John Banville is. He’s a truly excellent novelist under his own name, and then he also writes crime novels as Benjamin Black. And they’re not lazy crime novels, something tossed off just for fun. They stand on their own as thoughtful explorations of justice, love, duty, and honor.

In A Death in Summer, protagonist Dr. Quirke takes on one of the most heinous crimes of 20th century Ireland. Not the titular death in summer, of course. That’s just a murder, but it’s a lead-in to the greater crimes and sufferings of postwar Dublin, and those of the war and before it as well.

Banville barely mentions the nature of this greater crime over the course of the novel. It’s implied, lurking in the shadows. But we all know what happened. And Dr. Quirke knows it, because he experienced it as a child himself. But even experiencing it doesn’t help him identify it when it’s happening to someone else.

The novel as a whole is really an indictment of the Church, the government, the police, the families, of everyone, of all of Irish society. It’s infuriating. And it makes you wonder how it could possibly have happened. How any of it could have been hushed up for so long. But in the same way that Banville manages to write a novel about child abuse without actually saying “child abuse” at any point, we know. We’ve experienced it ourselves.

Just like Quirke’s childhood didn’t open his eyes to what was happening to other children, knowing it happened in Ireland in the 1940s doesn’t make it any easier to identify it in your own backyard.

The Hairpin had a post this past week about how stories—true stories, in this case—can act as passwords, unlocking other secrets, one after another. And after reading that post, and reading A Death in Summer, I understood the way these things remain hidden even more.

And it reminded me of something. When was ten or so, I was at a summer day camp with a boy nobody liked. I don’t remember his name, but he was awkward even by the standards of gawky tweens, and was prone to making up stories. He said had a girlfriend who lived in Canada, his dad drove a Ferrari, he was a black belt in a secret martial art he was sworn never to demonstrate, that kind of thing. He also claimed a degree of sexual experience that was improbable for a child his age. None of us believed a word of it.

Guess what part of his story I believe now?

Don’t attempt to read Marlon James’s astounding new novel A Brief History of Seven Killings in short bursts on the train to and from work each day. You won’t be able to absorb all the intricacies of the novel and you’ll find yourself at your desk wishing you were anywhere but here as long as you here involves reading the book.

Don’t start looking up information about Jamaica as you will find yourself climbing out of an internet hole hours later especially after looking at these amazing images of rude boys. What’s a rude boy? What does all this have to do with Bob Marley? Get ready to fall.

Definitely don’t look up words like ‘batty boy’ or ‘rass cloth’, not because they’re offensive, but again see above.

Don’t forget to mark the page listing the cast of characters at the beginning. You’ll need to refer to this constantly.

Don’t let the size or heft of the book scare you off. It was worth straining my wrists and arms trying to read with one arm on the train.

Do realize that Marlon James might be one of the most gifted writers out there. Proceed to your nearest bookstore to buy his previous two books The Book of Night Women and John Crow’s Devil and read them immediately.

Not for the faint of heart, Caitlin Doughty’s memoir of her road to becoming a mortician, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, features dead bodies–or decedents as we learn they’re properly called–on almost every page. As Doughty reveals, she came to think about death at an early age, witnessing a young girl fall to her death at a mall. The sound of the girl landing still haunts her.

The book opens as she starts her new job as a crematory operator at a family-owned mortuary, something she moved to San Francisco specifically to do. She learns the tricks of the trade from how to properly shave a dead body to how to make sure the body gets turned in the crematory machine so that the lower half of the body has its chance to burn. The chest, you see, takes the longest to burn as it’s the thickest part of the body. We meet Mike, her boss; Chris, the driver who picks up the bodies; and Bruce, the part-time mortician. It takes a certain kind of person, it seems, to work in the death industry. Doughty manages to not reduce them to caricatures. In fact, in her notes on sources, she mentions that she had the support of her coworkers and didn’t even have to change their names.

Doughty studied medieval history in college, specifically how that era approached death. This proves rich territory and each chapter has some sort of historical nugget that helps move along her point. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes succeeds precisely because she blends the blunt realities of what a body smells like after spending two days in the river with a thoughtful analysis of the culture of death, mixing in historical mores with the current. Doughty questions a  great deal about the culture of death beginning with the modern funeral process. For too long, she says, the funeral industry has imbued us with the idea that we must embalm the dead, i.e. make them look like the living. There’s a separation from death in our culture that didn’t exist even a hundred years ago  when one might die at home, be washed by a family member, and be buried in a simple box.

Some people will find this book and its subject matter appalling and the chapter titled ‘Dead Babies’ will be hard going for anyone. But Dought raises excellent points about what has become of our death culture. With the largest segment of population over 85 ever, we’re going to have to face some difficult questions. Luckily for us, Doughty and others like her, have already begun the discussion. One caveat, maybe don’t eat dinner while reading.

Imogen Robertson’s previous novels have largely been set in England around 1780, but The Paris Winter, takes us to Paris in 1909. Fortunately, Robertson hasn’t lost anything in the move. If anything, she has refined her usual combination of crime-thriller plotting and thought-provoking social-historical observation to produce what may be her best work yet.

Maude has come to Paris, as so many do, to learn to paint. She’s studying in a proper academy for ladies and paying too much for the privilege. Starving, broke, and on the verge giving up and going back to England, she befriends a well-to-do Russian classmate who seems to be a bit of a dilettante. Her classmate introduces her to a wide cast of society figures and sets her up with a job that gives her a place to live and enough to eat as well as a good stipend. It all seems too good to be true, and it is.

As Maude tries to find a purchase for herself in a society that cares nothing for her, Robertson takes us on a tour of belle-epoque Paris high and low and in-between, illustrating not only the station and constraints of the protagonist but of the wide range of characters she meets.

This is very much a 21st-century novel in that so many of the characters in this novel seem to be searching for self-actualization through professional development — even the rich classmate’s devoted nursemaid wants to open her own restaurant. But it is a sign of Robertson’s talent that this comes across not as an anachronism but as a keen observation of how the early 20th century offered increased opportunities and an ever-so-slight loosening of societal restrictions around class and gender.